India has become the fourth "lunar power"!
For the first time in the Earth's space history, the Indian “Vikram” spacecraft made a soft landing on the Moon near the South Pole and delivered a wheeled vehicle there. Thus, India became the fourth "lunar power" after the USSR, the USA and China. But most importantly, this country was the first to land in the polar region of the Moon!
India became a space power in the early 1980s after the successful launch of its first satellite. Despite this success, the Government of India has turned its attention to addressing pressing issues, giving priority to humanitarian issues, instead of investing in lunar and Martian programs.
The main task was to provide the people of India with communication and obtaining new scientific data about the Earth with the help of satellites. Only after the needy residents of this country received the necessary assistance, the government began to finance other space research.
At the beginning of this century, the standard of living of the Indians has improved significantly, as has the technological level of the space industry. In 2008, India conducted its first deep-space mission to the Moon, called “Chandrayaan-1” (Sanskrit for Moonship).
As part of this mission, a probe was sent into orbit around the Moon and an impactor was thrown onto the surface of the South Polar Region. As a result of the collision, lunar soil was ejected, and the spectrometer on the orbiter detected the presence of water in this cloud, moreover, before the American LRO satellite analyzed its distribution on the Moon.
During the next mission - Chandrayaan-2, which took place in 2019, it was planned to carry out a soft landing on the moon using a lunar rover. However, at an altitude of several kilometers, communication with the device was lost, and it fell, suffering serious losses.
In 2014, India launched its “Mangalyan” spacecraft into Mars orbit. But without stopping there, Delhi plans to create its own space station, explore the Moon, enter the orbit of Venus, and even the possibility of sending a probe to Jupiter, which, as you know, was able to do the American and European space agencies.
The launch of the current spacecraft, which delivered the “Vikram” landing module to the Moon, which successfully landed on the Earth's satellite, “Chandrayaan-3”, was carried out on July 14. And today it landed on the moon in the polar region, which was chosen at the time for the landing of the failed Russian mission “Luna-25”.
On Wednesday, more than 8 million people in India watched the “Chandrayaan 3” landing live broadcast with joy and pride.
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